Launch of Government of Karnataka Mobile Application Development Center of Excellence (CoE)(January 31, 2014)

From the Director's Desk:

Let me first wish each and every one of the IIIT-B family a great New Year 2014January has been hectic with the launch of Sponsored M.Tech. Programme for Samsung Research (Bangalore) engineers. This effort adds a new dimension to our offerings in education, and over the years will contribute significantly to our intellectual output.

Of course, there are many other developments that you will find in this month’s Newsletter.

HAPPYREADING

Faculty & Staff

Prof. Jyotsna Bapat gave a talk on "LTE-Advanced" at the workshop on Recent trends in communication engineering at SIT, Tumkur on January 25th, 2014.

The M.Tech. thesis paper of alumnus Abhinandan S.P. appeared in the the “Cloud of Clouds” special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Computers (it has been online at IEEE Xplore since May 2013). The work was praised by the guest editors of the special issue, who write, “This study will be an important contribution when real-life implementation on a multicloud vendor set up is carried out.” The reference is: Abhinandan S. Prasad, Shrisha Rao. "A Mechanism Design Approach to Resource Procurement in Cloud Computing”, IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 63 (1), January 2014, pp. 17–30, doi:10.1109/TC.2013.106.

Sunil Kumar Vuppala presented a webinar on the topic "Real Time Energy Management in Smart Grid" on January 16, 2014 as part of India Smart Grid Forum (ISGF) Webinar Series. http://indiasmartgrid.org

*India Smart Grid Forum (ISGF) is a Public Private Partnership (PPP) initiative of Ministry of Power, Government of India for accelerated development of Smart Grid technologies in the Indian power sector.

New Joinees

Prof. Balwant Godara has joined IIIT-B as visiting faculty on January 1, 2014.

Dr Mandar V. Kulkarni has joined as Post Doctoral Researcher in the Center for IT and Public Policy on January 2, 2014.

Prof. Brijesh Kumar Mishra has joined IIIT-B as Assistant Professor on January 20, 2014.

Mr Rajamani Mahadevan has joined the institute as Staff Officer, Deans’ Office on January 20, 2014.

Students

A team of iMTech 2nd year students participated and became finalists in the Lunar Rover Competition organised by IIT Madras and Team Indus as part of the "Shaastra 2014" technical fest held on January 4-7, 2014.
Guided by Prof. Poonacha P G, the team built a WiFi controlled rover powered by a Raspberry Pi and an Electric Ray controller, with a live video stream
The team comprised Chandan Yeshwanth, Sankalp Johri, Sanat R, Vikram Singh and Yashvanth Kondi.
Details of the competition can be found http://lunar.shaastra.org/authmn/home/.

iMTech 2nd year student Sushravya G M (IMT2012044) secured 2nd position in the student Project Competition part of IC -IMPETUS, an IEEE International Conference on IMPact of E-Technology on US, technically co-sponsored by IEEE and Consumer Electronics Society, Bangalore Chapter in PESIT, South Campus, Bangalore on January 10-11, 2014. The project title was Speech-controlled Robots in Cyber-Physical Environment. Dr. Sandhya Kulkarni was the mentor of this Project.

Robot plays the national anthem:
A Team of 2nd year iMTech students worked on the IRB 120 Robot in our HiDES Lab. They were able to make the robot play the basic beat of the national anthem on electronic drums. The proud & happy team members are Srikrisha Bhat, Harshavardhan Reddy, Nigel Fernandez and Tanmayee Narendra.

iMTech students contributed in developing facilitative tool to report sexual harassment in Indian public spaces:
Two iMTech students (Yashvanth Kondi and Daksh Varshneya) from IIIT-B along with two students (Bauke Bakker and Marissa Memelink) from University of Amsterdam developed a facilitative tool to report sexual harassment in Indian public spaces. Two teams focused on the same issue, paving the way for cross-cultural learning. The project was a collaborative effort between mediaLAB, Amsterdam at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, IIIT-B, and Fields of View, a Bangalore-based research organization. This project was funded by CISCO. The final presentation video link is available in this link.

Events

2nd term classes for all the batches bigan from January 1, 2014.

Lohri/ Pongal/Sankranthi on January 14, 2014:
In light of Lohri / Pongal / Sankranthi, a Rangoli competition was organised. Eight teams were participated in this competition & demonstrated their creativity.

MoU signing between IIIT-B and Samsung on January 21, 2014:
"IIIT-Bangalore and Samsung signed MoU for MTech programme and research collaboration"

Sponsored M.Tech. Programme:
Inauguration of the 1st batch of Sponsored M Tech Programme for Samsung Research (Bangalore) engineers was held on January 30, 2014. IIIT-B Director Prof. S Sadagopan addressed the students at the inaugural function. Dean Acadamic and R & D Prof. Debabrata Das, Faculty members Prof. Rajagopalan S, Prof. R chandrashekhar, Prof. JayPrakash L T and others were present. Classes have started from January 31, 2014.

65th Republic day on January 26, 2014:
We celebrated Republic day with a patriotic fervous. It included flag hoisting,an inspirational speech by Prof. S Sadagopan, Director, IIIT-B and singing of patriotic songs by students. Students were joined by members of our faculty and staff to make the celebration complete.

Kite Festival on January 26, 2014:
Following the republic day event IIIT-B celebrated the Kite Festival in the Campus. Students were participated in it.and enjoyed flying various types of Kites. Faculty members, Staff & their families took part in this event where spirits and soared as high as the Kites.

MoU signing between IIIT-B and Indian Naval Academy, Ezhimala on January 30, 2014:
IIIT - Bangalore signed MoU with Indian Naval Academy, Ezhimala, Kerala (Largest Naval academy of Asia) for highly skilled manpower training and research. In this collaboration institute and INA will mutually benefit by addressing multiple practical technical problems".

Mobile App CoE: Launch of Government of Karnataka Mobile Application Development Center of Excellence (CoE) on January 31, 2014.

Incubation

Fields of View (FoV):
" Fields of View (FoV) successfully completed a game to train the engineers at Institute for Plasma Research, a project on 'Conceptualising Living Wages' with University of Amsterdam, a game to understand the dynamics of electricity markets with TU Delft, and a project on safety of women in public spaces with MediaLab in Amsterdam. The researchers at FoV have conducted 10 game sessions with participants from diverse backgrounds such as decision makers, urban planners, designers, students, activists and artists. The paper titled 'Designing Energy Policy through the Indian Energy Game' was published at International Siumulation and Gaming Conference in Sweden. FoV was a partner for the UN Alliance of Civilizations worldwide contest on games and co-organised a gaming jam with swissnex India. FoV was featured on CNBC-TV 18's Young Turks as one of the emerging organisations in India. FoV is currently funded by and working with Department of Science and Technology - Govt. of India, IIIT-Bangalore, IIT-Gandhinagar, Netherlands eSciences Center, TU Delft, TARU, Gender at Work, MediaLab - Amsterdam, Institute for Plasma Research - Gandhinagar, and Malmo University.

Chipmonk product "OLLO" in Production
First production lot of 10 nos will be ready for installation by mid Feb, 2014
Chipmonk Metering solution has got a lead customer.
Production ready design is underway.

Visitors

Academia

Prof Simon Deleonibus, Director of CEA LETI France visited us on January 7 & 8, 2014.
He gave a talk on " Future Micro/Nano-Electronics: Towards Full 3D and Zero Variability"

Abstract - Nanoelectronics will have to face major challenges in the next decades in order to proceed with increasing progress to the sub 10 nm nodes level and face the challenge to approach zero variability. The main requirements will be to reduce leakage currents and reduce access resistances at the same time in order to fully exploit 3D integration at the device, elementary function, chip and system. New progress laws combined to the scaling down of CMOS based technology will emerge to enable new paths to Functional Diversification. New materials and disruptive architectures, mixing logic and memories, Heterogeneous Integration, introducing 3D schemes at the Front End and Back End levels, will come into play to make it possible.

Dr. Garud Iyengar, Professor, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
Columbia University visited us on January 9, 2014.

Prof. Yuri Bilu Universite de Bordeaux, France visited us and gave a talk on January 13, 2014 : He is a well known mathematician who works in Number theory, Diophantine Geometry and Arithmetic.Title of the talk was “2500 years of numbers: from Pythagoras to automata “

Abstract - He Spoke on the history of various notions of numbers: irrational numbers, algebraic numbers, transcendental numbers, and on the recent notion of automatic numbers, and about relations between them. In particular, we will answer the following question: can one produce a computer program giving the decimal expansion of the square root of 2.